Twenty-Two
by dharmamonkey
Summary: Recently returned to duty after his brain surgery, Booth struggles with his feelings in the wake of Brennan's revelation that she lost her virginity at age 22 and considers what that says about her attitudes towards sex, men and relationships. Episode tag to 5x3, "Plain in the Prodigy." A birthday fic for oddestcastle.


**Twenty-Two**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** _I don't own Bones. I am, however, interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply._

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**A/N: **_Friend, reader and fellow writer _**oddestcastle **_turns 22 years old on October 23rd. She's been an incredible supporter of my writing over the last couple of years and I wanted to honor her birthday with a little something. And since she's turning 22, I just had to do it with a "Plain in the Prodigy" tag. (I mean, come on! "Twenty-two?!") I hope you enjoy it, kiddo._

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I couldn't stop thinking about it.

I tried and tried and tried, but every time I closed my eyes, all I could see was her raise that slender, perfect right brow, flutter those gorgeous eyelashes and look at me with those piercing gray-green eyes as that mouth—that absolutely kissable mouth of hers—smiled back at me with a crooked grin that sent a hot tingle prickling up my spine and crackling all the way down my legs.

She was as she always was: shameless and completely uninhibited in the way she approached talking about sex, and as far as I could tell (and, hell, by her own admission) how she approached actually _having_ sex.

So of course, Bones didn't bat a single feathery eyelash before, right out of the goddamn blue as we're driving back from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, she turned to me and asked, "Would you advise Parker that sexual intercourse at age sixteen is a wise decision?"

I had no idea what we were talking about or why, or by what crazy-ass mental beeline we managed to veer from talking about Eli Yoder's father to talking about _that_.

"What—how did you know that?" I stammered, blushing a little as I found myself again caught flat-footed by something she'd said. You'd think I'd be used to it by now.

My hands were on the wheel but my eyes and focus were drawn to her face, her voice, and the way those soul-swallowing eyes of hers glimmered with amused curiosity. I shook my head again, flailing a bit inside my own mind as I struggled to figure out how I'd managed to slip so far afield from a normal, professional conversation. I felt like I'd walked into the middle of a discussion that was already underway, which happened to me a lot when it came to her. Once her relentless mental freight train really got going full-speed inside that genius skull of hers about something or the other, I'd be mowed down and backed into a rhetorical corner before I even knew what was happening.

"Wait," I said, "what are we talking about?"

That's when she told me that Cam was afraid that Michelle was having sex.

"Oh, no," I said, forcing my focus back again to the road ahead of us. "That's not good.

Her eyes narrowed and she barely bit back a snicker when she said, "Well, you just said that you were having sex when you were sixteen..."

"Mm-hmm, that's different," I told her, hoping to head off the conversation at the pass. I had absolutely no desire whatsoever to talk to Bones about the night I lost my virginity on a vinyl-covered bench seat in the back of a 1970 Chevelle SS, or all the afternoons my girlfriend and I 'studied' together in her room before exams (even though we weren't in any of the same classes, since I was a junior and she was a senior).

I saw her eyes narrow with skepticism and I knew right then I'd just walked myself into the middle of a well-tilled minefield. "Oh, so there's a double standard?"

"Of course," I said quickly, knowing that _that_ little humdinger there was not a conversation I, a stereotypical example of an Alpha Male, wanted to have with my Ph.D. anthropologist partner.

I suddenly remembered standing in the boys' locker room at South Philadelphia High School after a basketball game listening to Derek Mulcahy regale me and another guy with a tale of how he did his girlfriend against the wall of his parents' basement game-room while they were out of town for the weekend. I wasn't a pig, not even when I was sixteen, but I knew plenty of guys who were. The thought of Michelle with a guy like Derek Mulcahy made me want to punch something.

"You know what?" I said. "Cam needs to shut that _down_."

Bones blinked and shrugged away my comment, and I could almost hear her sigh in response to the flare of my protectiveness. "I said that Michelle should wait until she's at least seventeen and a half," she said.

I grunted a little chuckle under my breath as I leaned into the gas and powered the Sequoia around a bend in the tree-covered rural road. "Is that how old _you_ were?" I asked, averting my eyes as I tried to seem disinterested. A heavy, pregnant silence hung between us for a beat as I awaited her answer with a lot more interest than I dared show while she, for some reason, hesitated.

"No," she said finally, looking away as she spoke. "I was twenty-two."

_What? _

That, _that_, was the last thing in the world I would have expected to hear from my partner to whom sexual intercourse was merely another anthropological inevitability. Stunned, I tore my eyes from the pavement and swung my head around in amazement.

"Twenty-two?!" I coughed, unable to conceal my surprise.

My partner is seldom surprised by anything I do—she thinks she has me figured out, and has since the day I first walked into her classroom at American University—but she was clearly surprised by my surprise that afternoon.

"Well, don't...why do you sound shocked?" she asked, her reedy voice peaking in protest.

I looked out of the corner of my eye and glanced at the road ahead, which had thankfully straightened out, but kept my head turned and my focus solidly on her as my mind began to race. I couldn't believe that Bones, who I knew to be a woman with a healthy sexual appetite and a confidence that made her even sexier than she already was, waited until she was twenty-two to have sex. Why, I wasn't sure, but it sure as hell wasn't because she wasn't beautiful or confident enough to attract the interest of the young men around her.

"No, it's just..." I could hear myself backpedaling. "That's a good age." I didn't want her to take my surprise as an indication that I thought something was wrong with her. "Twenty-two?" I still couldn't believe it and couldn't keep from grinning as my mind drifted to an image of a younger Bones, walking around the Northwestern campus with a backpack on her shoulder, surveying the crowd milling around the student union and trying to decide who would be the right guy to let be her first.

"It was an important decision," she said, a bit of the reediness in her voice having melted away in favor of a husky warmth that had been echoing in my head for years. "I gave it a lot of thought." Her long dark eyelashes fluttered as she entertained a memory of that first time. "I finally found a man who could provide a skillful introduction," she said, her beautiful pale eyes twinkling as her lip curled up into a sexy, wonderfully self-conscious half-grin that made my balls hitch hard. I tried not to run the damn Sequoia off the road as I tried to pull it all together in my mind.

"Okay," I said with a laugh, at once a little surprised but yet, really, _not _surprised that Bones approached losing her virginity the same way she seemed to approach everything else—carefully and rationally, systematically working towards an objective. "You make it sound like it was a class that you took."

I lay in my bed that night, and as troubled as I should have been thinking about Levi Yoder and the heartbreaking grief that burned in his parents' eyes as we talked to them that afternoon, I wasn't thinking about Levi at all.

I was thinking about Bones.

Although I shouldn't have been thinking about it, or her that way, I couldn't help it. I couldn't get it out of my head.

"_I finally found a man who could provide a skillful introduction…"_

It was stupid, really, but all I could think about was Bones, a younger Bones, laying in an unmade bed in some ramshackle apartment west of the campus, her beautiful gray-green eyes glittering with interest as those gorgeous hands of hers with their long, slender fingers, trembled ever so slightly with nerves. I knew from the look she had on her face in the truck that afternoon that her first time was by no means unpleasant, but still, the idea of it, and the way she approached it, really troubled me. The thought of it clung to my every breath as I lay there in my own bed.

_A skillful introduction…_

Whatever it was he did, whoever the hell _he _was, he didn't do it right. He didn't do right by her, however skillfully he introduced her to the physical act of having sex.

She didn't need a "skillful introduction."

No, what she needed was to be shown what it was to make love, to really _make love,_ to know that she is beautiful and brilliant and absolutely incredible as a woman, to know that she mattered and that she was worth it.

A part of me wished it had been _me_—that _I _had been the one to be her first, to show her that sex could be more than bodies coming together and all the moaning and sweat and bodily fluids that went along with it—and by "part of me," I don't just mean the obvious part, although I'll admit that as I lay there in my bed, _that_ part of me was definitely awake, too.

The only light in my room was the rosy, flickering glow of the neon sign outside of my apartment window, and all I could think about was her and what that her beautiful skin would look like in that light. _Bones. _I thought about what it would be like to be with her, to worship her, every part of her—body, mind and soul—with every part of me, to drown myself inside of her as I put everything I had and everything I was into making her feel the way she deserved to feel. I wanted to make her feel every bit as amazing as she was. Because she _was_ amazing.

And because I knew. I knew loved her.

I _loved _her.

I had loved her for a long, long time, since long before I started talking to imaginary people who didn't exist and long before the docs had to go into my brain to scoop out a tumor the size of a melon ball. To hell with Sweets and the bright pink caudate whatever-the-hell it was he saw on the CT scans of my brain that told him what I did and didn't feel and what was and wasn't real. Sex was more than intercourse and love..._love..._was more than chemicals and lit-up wads of neurons on computerized brain-scans.

The way I felt that night, laying there in my bed thinking about Bones, wasn't a mirage created by a gush of chemicals in my brain.

It was _real_.

I kept thinking how, for all the men she'd been with since she was twenty-two, none of them had shown her the love that she deserved, or given themselves to her the way a man gives himself to a woman when he really makes love to her.

I _loved_ her.

I loved her and as far away as the idea of it seemed right then, I knew that someday, somehow, I would show her what it really meant to make love. I would show her what that guy all those years ago didn't and what no guy since then ever had: that sex without love was thrilling and hot but more or less empty fucking, but that two people coming together in love was nothing less than magic.

And you know what? When it finally did happen for us, it was.

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**A/N: **_Happy birthday, my friend! I hope that was everything you hoped it would be._

_I hope the rest of you non-birthday types enjoyed it, too. But don't leave me in the dark. Drop me a line. Share your thoughts about this little ditty. Please leave a review. _

_Thanks for reading!_


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